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This chapter considers the role of ‘memory politics’ – understood as the combination of official and unofficial attempts to deal with the legacy of past violations – in the struggle for democratization in Central America: official initiatives can include truth commissions, amnesty dispensations, criminal investigations and prosecutions, and a range of institutional reforms aimed at redressing the previous failure of the state to guarantee human rights; unofficial initiatives developed by civil society actors to confront the past can include investigations of violations, legal actions, and different kinds of commemorative acts and exercises in collective memory. Memory politics operates at multiple levels and involves a diversity of agents, including local communities, national and international non-governmental human rights organizations (HROs), governments, the media, and, in the case of Central America, the UN; however, it is suggested here that its long-term effects in any national context depend on the interaction between official and unofficial efforts to address the legacies of the past. The experiences of memory politics analysed in this chapter are those of El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala, the three Central American countries that during the 1990s undertook official processes of investigating past violations of human rights. The precise nature of memory politics and the impact it has had varied considerably in these three countries, and it is suggested that four interrelated factors are central to explaining differences between the respective national experiences: the first is the specific political and social legacies of human rights abuse in each country; the second concerns the circumstances of the transition from war to peace, specifically the prevailing balance of forces and the trade-off between truth and justice that this engendered in each case; the third is the role of local HROs and civil society in general in the politics of memory; and the fourth is the role of international governmental and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in efforts to uncover the truth about the past and to address the consequences of violations. The first three sections of the chapter compare the legacies of human rights abuses, the transitional trade-offs between truth and justice, and the role of civil society organizations and international actors in the memory politics of El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala; the final section considers the impact of memory politics on the prospects for democracy in these countries.

At the Escuela Agricola Panamericana in Zamorano, Honduras, Carr confirmed many times that local people had valuable stories to tell about their lives and nature. Even their myths contained interesting bits of knowledge and perspective. Yet, Carr believed that well-meaning US bureaucrats consistently underestimated the Central Americans and discounted their claims. It would be fair to say that most scientists, particularly northern scientists, found little or nothing of value in the stories of Latin American peasants. Because he spoke Spanish fluently, Carr had access to information that few North American scientists could capture. Appreciation of local people and their stories served Carr for the rest of his long career, especially as he began the detailed investigation of sea turtles. His conservation programs also acknowledged and incorporated the interests and needs of local culture. Like his students in Florida, many of his students at the Escuela Agricola Panamericana never forgot him.

This chapter steps back and asks the question of whether the dilemmas that families face, as great as they are, continue to be relevant in the context of other crises from epidemics to natural disasters to the long-term aftermath of wars. It examines what matters and what does not in times of crisis and afterward, beginning with families in Botswana, where the AIDS pandemic has led to a reduction in life expectancy. The chapter next examines the lives of families in Honduras, after massive mudslides displaced more than a million people. It also describes families in Vietnam a quarter-century after a war that led to several million deaths. Even in the midst of these tragedies and their aftermaths, there are glimpses of hope—programs that are truly making a difference in the lives of children. The chapter ends by describing these programs and the chance they provide for profound change.

This book aims to provide an understanding of the transnational dynamics of Central America. This is a region that includes Guatemala, Belize, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, and Panama. These countries share a close geographical relationship and historical background, a geopolitical interdependence, and challenges in the international arena. In tracing the transnational dynamics of Central America, the book analyzes the connected history, close and dynamic interrelations, crossings and mutual impact of the countries of the isthmus on one another, in addition to their geopolitical interdependence and a series of common challenges they have faced in the international arena. This book is an attempt to make sense of these and other regional trends by indicating that one needs to approach Central America with a Janus-faced perspective: trying to understand the process of fragmentation into separate nation-states along with lingering transnational dynamics.

This chapter analyses key hypotheses on the impacts of rural population growth on agriculture, natural resource management, and related impacts on poverty in development countries. It is argued that the impacts of population growth likely to be negative when there is no collective response than when population growth induces infrastructure development, collective action, institutional or organisational development. The results of recent studies by the International Food Policy Research Institute in Honduras are discussed.

Where did the transnational gangs come from and how violent are they? This chapter begins with the story of a Salvadoran ex-member of the Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13) in order to better understand how this gang and others emerged in the streets of East Los Angeles and evolved to become loosely-networked “franchises” with thousands of members in several countries. In the 1990s the Los Angeles Police Department deported tens thousands of Central American youth, among whom were many members of the MS-13 and the M-18 who colonized the local street gangs already existing in Central America. The transnational gangs are compared to a franchise in order to emphasize their fluidity and their highly local dynamics along with their adoption of internationally recognized symbols, vocabulary, and protocols. The chapter also examines the connection between gang membership and homicide rates in the “Northern Triangle” of Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador.

This chapter examines Central American evangelical churches and how they emerged in the region. The chapter emphasizes the fact that Central American evangelicals see themselves as religious “outsiders” even though their numbers have grown considerably in recent years. According to the most recent polling data, nearly a third of Central Americans now self-identify as Protestant and most of these individuals belong to evangelical or Pentecostal congregations. The chapter also examines the different streams of evangelical Christianity in the region, paying particular attention to what the author calls “barrio evangelicalism”—the small, local, Pentecostalized congregations that abound in the poor and working-class neighborhoods (barrios). These congregations emphasize strict personal piety, evangelization, and physical and psychological healing.

This chapter examines Catholic and evangelical gang intervention and prevention programs in order to understand the religious and nonreligious motives behind gang ministry as well as the very different approaches to ministry taken by Catholics when compared with evangelicals. Whereas Catholic gang interventionists promote community development and social and political change, evangelical gang ministry workers tend to view the gang problem as a “spiritual problem” best addressed by the church. Although some of the reasons for these differences probably have more to do with differences in levels of education, evangelical pastors and promoters tend to view themselves as “good Samaritans” seeking to help individual gang members while Catholic priests and ministry workers tend to view themselves as “Crusaders” against systemic injustice. The chapter also explores possible explanations for why evangelical growth remains strong in the region—even among males, despite its lifestyle expectations.

Does evangelical religion provide a hopeful solution to Central America’s struggle with gang violence? Or, is it merely a distraction from the real work of structural reform and economic justice. After reviewing the findings of prior chapters, the author argues that while religious conversions do offer useful resources for individual gang members seeking to leave the gang and rebuild an identity and a stable lifestyle, evangelical religion will not solve Central America’s problem with gang violence. In fact, some of the ex-gang members interviewed grew up in evangelical households prior to joining the gang. Instead, a multipronged approach is necessary that involves removing or reducing the social sources of shame such as poverty and family-disrupting migration, as well as reducing opportunities for money making through the drug trade by ending the self-defeating war on drugs.

Pediatric heart surgery missions define an emergent, high-tech form of medical humanitarianism characterized by their focus not on populations in crisis (Redfield 2013), but on broken body parts—in this case, damaged pediatric hearts. Comprised of specialists from the world’s most elite medical centers, mission teams make brief visits to poor countries to perform highly-specialized and otherwise prohibitively expensive surgical procedures on children with few alternatives for survival. A team’s success is measured in terms of patient volume, surgical complexity, and the probability of the patient being well enough to leave the hospital within 30 days. This chapter explores the forms of bioprecarity that both precede and follow mission visits and that inadvertently affect the very patients whose surgeries are publicly billed as ‘successes’. That is, as much as surgical missions aim to repair pediatric bodies in distress, they, too, produce new anxieties, uncertainties, and biological vulnerabilities for patients and their families that are often visible only long after missions depart from the host country. These findings emerged from 13 months of ethnographic fieldwork carried out in Honduras, an established destination for medical and surgical missions, where I carried out observations and interviews in public hospitals before, during, and after visits by pediatric heart surgery missions as well as in the homes of surgical patients.

This chapter discusses human migration and multiethnicity in Copan, a Maya archaeological site in modern Honduras. A broad skeletal sample from the site has been studied through basic osteology, mortuary archaeology, and archaeochemistry (stable isotope analysis). The combined results show that the ancient city had a significant number of immigrants from all over the Maya Area. There was no sex or age related distinction, nor socioeconomic exclusivity, among these immigrants. In such a multiethnic city, biocultural body modifications, like dental decorations and intentional head shaping, were indicative of their social identities, especially “Mayahood.” The dynamic changes of these biocultural attributes at spatial and chronological scales are evidence of shifting social identities at the southeastern borderland of the Maya Area.

This chapter asks the question of whether the dilemmas that families face, as great as they are, continue to be relevant in the context of other crises, from epidemics to natural disasters, to the long-term aftermath of wars. It begins with families in Botswana, where the AIDS pandemic has led to a reduction in life expectancy measured in decades. Next, it explores the lives of families in Honduras, two years after massive mudslides displaced more than a million people. Then, families in Vietnam were interviewed a quarter-century after a war that led to several million deaths. Even in the midst of these tragedies and their aftermaths, there are glimpses of hope—programs that are truly making a difference in the lives of children, not just for a moment, but for a generation. It ends by describing these programs and the chance they provide for profound change.

Why did Spanish Europeans decide not to settle the mainland, coast, and cayes that are now Belize? How did Spaniards or other seafaring Europeans view Belize's coast, and did this information find its way to early maps? How was the land that became Belize known to the early conquerors? In this chapter, possible Franciscan travel through Belize is discussed, as is the important role of trade and coastal travel in the Maya world just prior to the Conquest, with much of the information based on archaeological data. An attempt is made to contextualize Belize in terms of the conquests of Yucatan and Central America.

This chapter discusses the so-called Ch'orti' area, its people, culture and language. Ch'orti' culture and language existed in what is today eastern Guatemala, western Honduras, and northwestern El Salvador at the time of the Spanish-Mexican invasion. This chapter analyzes the impact of the Spanish invasion and colonization on the indigenous polities in the region and provides a map showing the location of the Ch'orti' area.

This chapter examines the environmental record of human population and migration in the Copan Valley, Honduras, which is the most prominent archaeological site in the region defined in this book as the Ch'orti' area. It analyzes settlement patterns and material culture and explores how data from two sediment cores extracted from under bodies of water in the Copan Valley can contribute to debates on human population in this area. The findings suggest that Maya may have arrived in the valley a couple of hundred years prior to the arrival of K'inich Yax K'uk' Mo'.

This chapter examines the ethnographic analogy and the archaeological evidence of Maya identity at the Copan Valley archaeological site in Honduras. It analyzes the continuity and force of the Maya designation for ancient Copan by considering the contributions of specific archaeologists during the recent, ongoing phase of research there. It explores the ways in which past, recent, and ongoing archaeological work at Copan does, and inevitably will, inform identity politics in Honduras.

This chapter examines the impact of the rise of the sea-level on the civilization especially on the salt production and salt works of Punta Ycacos during the Late Classic Maya period. The discovery and excavation of ten inundated sites that date back to the Classic period in the Port Honduras region suggest and document the Holocene sea-level rise. The production of salt in Punta Ycacos occurred in relation to the surge of settlement in the Port Honduras region and in the inland region of southern Belize during the Late Classic Maya period. However, the collapse of the southern Maya civilization and the abandonment of inland cities in southern Belize and Pasion led to the decline of demand for Punta Ycacos salt. The rising seas which submerged the salt workshops led to the abandonment of Punta Ycacos salt production sites. The sea level played an important role in the Mayan civilization as the level of the sea determined the availability of resources and habitable land for the ancient coastal areas of the Mayan civilization. Although the rise of sea-level cannot be pinpointed as the sole rationale behind the abandonment of the Punta Ycacos salt shops as the extinction of the coastal towns of Port Honduras and the Punta Ycacos salt shops were the result of the complex interplay between cultural and environmental factors, the sea-level at some point did obviate the use of the Punta Ycacos shops during the Postclassic period.

This chapter discusses the salt production and salt trade in Late Classic Mayan Society. Salt production in the Punta Ycacos Lagoon during the Late Classic period used to supply the coastal towns of the Port Honduras region and the inland Maya cities of southern Belize and the Pasion region in Guatemala. Although the produced salt of the coastal region of the southern Maya lowlands was used for trading, there is no evidence that there existed a trade of goods between the Port of Honduras and the northern coast of the Yucatan during the Late Classic period. Instead, an extensive coastal-inland trade between the highlands of Guatemala and the southern Maya lowlands did occur wherein the salt was the primary traded good. However in the rise of cultural changes brought about by the fall of Mayan civilization and by the abandonment of inland cities together with the increase in the sea level pushed the Punta Ycacos salt production into oblivion. The discovery of these salt production sites provides a glimpse of the existence of specialized, non-domestic production and the existence of economically friendly trade within complex societies wherein the long-trade was limited to highly valuable items while inland trade was punctuated by the delivery and exchange of everyday goods essential for daily human existence.